arstechnica.com Archives - 19 January 2013, Saturday

Hundreds of thousands of websites are potentially at risk following the discovery of an extremely critical vulnerability in the Ruby on Rails framework that gives remote attackers the ability to execute malicious code on the underlying servers. The bug is present in Rails versions spa...

Last year, we wrote about Satoshi Dice , a Bitcoin-based online "slot machine." This month, at least one company hopes to introduce Bitcoin-based poker. The move could help to re-open online poker to American gamblers in the face of vigorous efforts by the US government to shut down o...

Back in June I heard about two San Francisco startups—Lyft and SideCar—that had similar business models. By the next month, I became a driver for both companies . Both companies allow individuals armed with smartphones to moonlight as not-quite-taxi drivers. Then, potential passengers...

Bitcoin Central, a Bitcoin exchange that is popular in the eurozone, says it has secured approval from regulators to operate as a bank under French law. The announcement could be another sign of the cryptocurrency's growing legitimacy. The news was announced in a Thursday post on the ...

It also helped that the campaign, at least for internally developed applications, relied almost exclusively on Amazon Web Service for its infrastructure, eliminating a lot of the financial burden of infrastructure management. "For the applications built by the OFA [Obama for America] ...

WordPress is now the most well-known company to accept Bitcoin. redditor freeborn Bitcoin users of the world, unite! Or rather, unite around the fact that you can now buy WordPress upgrades via the digital cryptocurrency. WordPress has announced that it will now accept payment for its...

Enlarge / A long chain of Bitcoin transactions, showing each address putting aside a small number of digital coins, helps illustrate a finding that 78 percent of them remain dormant in "savings accounts." Dorit Ron, Adi Shamir More than three-quarters of the digital coins in the Bitco...

One of the traditional strengths of Bitcoin, the peer-to-peer cryptocurrency , has been its decentralization. Because no one is in charge of the network, users place their trust in the security of the Bitcoin protocol rather than in any specific institution. Yet decentralization also ...

Bitfloor, a fast-growing Bitcoin exchange that was felled by a security breach earlier this month, has resumed operations. Founder Roman Shtylman announced the site's revival on Google Plus. The exchange lost Bitcoins valued at about $250,000 in the heist. As a result, Bitfloor was in...

The future of the up-and-coming Bitcoin exchange Bitfloor was thrown into question Tuesday when the company's founder reported that someone had compromised his servers and made off with about 24,000 Bitcoins, worth almost a quarter-million dollars. The exchange no longer has enough ca...

When news of Silk Road , the secretive online marketplace that allows drugs to be purchased with bitcoins , broke last year, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) was not pleased. He denounced the currency as a "an online form of money laundering." Despite the Senator's bluster, though, the Bit...

BitInstant says it expects to launch the first bitcoin-enabled debit card within the next several weeks. If a New York City Bitcoin startup has its way, there will soon be a much easier way to transfer the cryptocurrency between the digital world and actual, usable, real-world fiat ca...

The price of Bitcoins surged this week, rising above $9 for the first time in almost a year. The increase suggests growing public interest in the peer-to-peer cryptocurrency. Last month, we marked the one-year anniversary of the Bitcoin bubble popping. We noted that after plunging for...

Earlier this week, four users of the well-known Bitcoin trading platform Bitcoinica filed a complaint in a San Francisco court asking for $460,457.70 from the company. The plaintiffs allege that Bitcoinica, which had been hacked twice earlier this year, neglected the safety of its use...

We've noted before that the cryptocurrency Bitcoin has been adopted enthusiastically by those engaged in legally dubious pursuits like gambling and drug purchases. Forbes points us to a new study that backs up this proposition with hard data. Nicolas Christin, a researcher at Carnegie...

Two Australian law enforcement agencies are crowing about their arrest of a man who attempted to import illicit drugs into Australia using the online drug marketplace Silk Road. In a press release brought to our attention by CSO , the Australian Federal Police (AFP) and the Australian...